HTC was off to a great start this year, but just hit a bump in the road when the U.S. Customs halted shipments of the Sprint EVO 4G LTE and the AT&T One X due to violations with Apple patents. It also caused a delay for the EVO 4G LTE launch, which was supposed to be in stores starting tomorrow. It all surrounds the messaging and browser app, in which a pop up of options appears when tapping a link. For example you might get a choice of which email client to use when tapping on an email address. This infringes on Apple patent #5,946,647.
The interesting thing is that HTC already removed these pop ups with both the Sprint EVO 4G LTE and the AT&T One X. Not only that, there is an App Associations menu (pictured above and below) that allows you to choose default apps to be associated with certain items. So when tapping on an email address, you can set Gmail to be the default or the stock Email app.
I’ve tested this on both my EVO 4G LTE and AT&T One X, and I can confirm that you won’t get a pop up to choose applications. In the case of the EVO 4G LTE, I did get a pop up, but it was to open an email client. For whatever reason the default application for emails was set to the stock email application (in the App Associations menu). I didn’t have one set up so it asked me what type of email account I wanted to add. See below:
Whether these changes will appease the U.S. Customs or not is unclear, but I don’t understand why this wouldn’t have been approved beforehand so we wouldn’t have to deal with this mess?
source: theverge